Sauntering Vaguely Downward

A thing happened recently that I didn't feel comfortable addressing directly with the person involved, so it's turned into a journal post.

Someone felt the need to go on a diatribe to me about how it's a travesty that Americans continue to celebrate Thanksgiving, a holiday built on what can mildly be described as false premises.

Every year I post a picture to Facebook of Wednesday Addams holding a match and delivering the following speech about Thanksgiving.

You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides. You will play golf, and enjoy hot hors d'oeuvres. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They have said, "Do not trust the Pilgrims, especially Sarah Miller."...And for all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.

Despite this, every year, I make an effort to celebrate Thanksgiving. Since I've had the space to do so, I've invited as many people as I can cater for to my home and fed them, at the very least, on pumpkin pie and wine. Because I also believe that despite its hugely problematic origins, the saccharine mythology of which continues to be propagated in American schools, it is possibly one of the nicest American traditions in the way it is actually practiced. I have on many occasions not been able to be with my own family on Thanksgiving, including the entirety of the last decade. Yet because of the generosity of friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances, I have never felt alone or unloved on this holiday. When most Americans hear that you haven't got anywhere to be on Thanksgiving, they will immediately invite you to their own celebration, even if they don't know you well, and the invitation will be sincere. You don't have to take it if you don't want to. But the option is always there - to be fed a nice meal, in company of people in good spirits, which in my world is one of the best things you can ever do for others.

I know the origin stories of America, especially as taught to young Americans, are full of inconsistencies and glaring omissions. I know that Americans have, to put it mildly, not always behaved well as colonists. If I were to get romantic about it, I could argue that I embody the conflict between colonial and colonised interests from the cultural right down to the genetic level, given my parents' national and racial origins.

I also know that in choosing to become British, I have taken on the mantle of possibly the most notorious of the modern colonialist oppressors. And I know that in choosing to emigrate permanently, I have given up on participation in a large portion of the culture I was brought up in. I spend 99% of my time immersed in British culture. My partner is British. My children will grow up predominantly British.

So. I get angry when someone feels the need to tell me that, of the 1% of my time that I choose deliberately to celebrate something that is American, I shouldn't be doing it. Perhaps, O White English Person, the next time you feel the need to dress someone down for clinging to a tiny portion of the culture in which they grew up, you should consider that you are possibly not the most appropriate mouthpiece of justice.

I have a lot of feelings about the killing that took place in Woolwich this week, and most of them are bad.

I have seen friends supporting calls for the killers' deportation, and it makes me intensely sad. Because the killers are British. You can't 'send them home'. They ARE home. It is a grave mistake to let sociopathic murderers dictate the way we view them or determine the way the justice system treats them. This is their country. If they have committed premeditated murder here, then this is where they must be tried and lose their freedom - but not their lives, as our laws are more humane than they have been and would be themselves.

The killers have been convinced - through a grooming process not dissimilar to that employed to pressure young girls into prostitution - that they are not British. To encourage them in this misconception through deportation would be the worst possible outcome. It would reinforce and perpetuate the idea that British people can relieve themselves of the responsibility of respecting British law if they become sufficiently radicalised. To extend the analogy with the aforementioned young girls, it would be like telling them that the damage done to them was irreversible and placing them in permanent service to a brothel. There is nothing to be gained from turning the words and deeds of extremists into a course of action. Neither the atrocities they commit nor the falsehoods they speak should be allowed to dictate our laws or shape our society. That goes for the killers as well as the racist xenophobes presently demanding vigilante justice.

As it turns out, my Kindle helps me to engage in arguments that I would previously have avoided like the plague. For instance, I was out with four friends last night at a pub, and someone brought up Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I don't remember what the conversation was originally about, but suddenly he uttered the phrase, "...it's not racist."

Now, normally this is the point at which I'd look round at my four white friends, who were clearly ready to prepared to let this pass without mention, and I'd drop it myself. I find it tiresome to be the one non-white person calling something racist and being talked down by a bunch of white people who are uncomfortable with the conversation and would rather be arguing about whose round of drinks it is. But I've actually read Heart of Darkness fairly recently on my Kindle. And what's more, I'd made a point of underlining certain passages that allowed me to state with certainty, "Yes, it is."

Then he started in with the "but it's a great piece of literature", "you can't judge it because of the prevailing attitudes in the time in which it was written" and "the definition of racism has changed over time" arguments. I patiently refuted the first - I was absolutely not saying that Heart of Darkness isn't a worthy piece of literature. It is. That doesn't mean it's not racist. As for the second, I can absolutely judge it to be racist no matter when it was written, because of the incorrectness of the third statement. Racism is discrimination against another person based on their race. It's really very simple. While Heart of Darkness certainly criticizes colonialism and discrimination in a passionate manner, the language used in many passages is racist.

So I took a deep breath and walked away from the group to go to the toilet. After using that noble facility for the purpose for which it was designed, I got out my Kindle and flipped through to "My Clippings". Then I walked back outside and read out the following passage (emphasis mine):

Imagine him here - the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a king of ship as rigid as a concertina - and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sandbanks, marshes, forests, savages, - precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink.

Trying to argue that it isn't racist to call the people of a country "savages" while referring to yourself as a "civilized man" is futile, which he eventually conceded. But damn, I really love my Kindle for giving me the armoury to tackle a conversation I would otherwise have been unwilling to have.

By the way, if you're wondering about racism, may I point you at this Tumblr: Yo, is this racist? (With snaps to ajnabieh.) My favourite entry is this one.